the humility of the brutes

Reviewed by Don Johnson

14 may 2018 archive

SLAers who have attended our recent gatherings will be delighted to have this book in front of them, so that they can move beyond the pleasure generated by hearing the poems read to a deeper and profounder appreciation provided through close reading. All the latest sports poems are here: from "Bronze Boxer," a fine sonnet based on the volume's cover, a provocative photo Smith himself took of a sculpture of a Roman boxer housed in the National Roman Museum, to "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Half-Rubber," a dissertation on a Savannah County, Georgia version of stickball. Sports poems abound: "Apocalypse," a piece about a promising high school football star side-tracked by a freak auto accident; "Noseguard" a well-informed portrait of the violent world experienced at the center of a defensive line; "The Coach in My Head Never Stops Asking How Much I Want It," whose title is self-explanatory; "Edgar Athletic Poe," a radical re-working of the Poe biography emphasizing the poet's physical exploits and examining how much he "wanted it."

And there are more, each one finely crafted, ringing with intellectual depth and authenticity, and yet not without the humor and self-deprecatory modesty anyone who has heard Smith read will appreciate. A perfect example is "Hurdling the Wedge," a narrative of the jock alter ego, "Smitty's" plan to neutralize the wedge used by VMI to protect their runner on kickoffs. In memory, Smith highlights the anticipation of a heroic tackle achieved by his launching himself over the wall of blockers, which is thwarted by a Keydet's rising under him, catapulting him high in the air, causing him to miss the play entirely and come back to earth alone. Smitty's intended heroics were the object of a good deal of amusement on the part of his teammates, and a direct jibe from the coach, who, in viewing the game films quips, "Smitty, I didn't know you could fly."

But the locker room humor is tempered by Smith's epigraph for this poem from Herman Melville: "Failure is the true test of greatness." The quote not only informs the poem, since it ends with the speaker saying that the coach, deep down, did know he could "fly," and the speaker ultimately knew it as well. More important, the quote illustrates the way in which all of these poems are infused with a comprehensive intelligence which brings to experience a broader world of ideas and culture at large. "Apocalypse," about the gifted athlete who sustains the crippling injury, reveals the way in which the young man's intellectual world expands as a direct result of abrupt evaporation of his athletic promise. The boy didn't know at the time how this shocking accident, the worst wound the surgeon had ever seen, would "set him free," to wander the world, "limp [an eternal reminder of his accident] down Fishamble Street, Handel's Messiah / surging through his head," to "slowly [emphasis mine] climb to the Parthenon" or to "sip … / from a tisane mixed by a child in Nishisonogi."

Given the number of poems devoted to sport or sporting themes in this collection, it's somewhat surprising to realize that most of its poems are devoted to the worldly view described above: forays into Celtic mythology in "Cairbre & Bres the Beautiful" and "De Danaans, or Thank God for Plastic"; journeys to Rome, to Leningrad and St. Petersburg; nods to Dostoevsky, Edwin Weston, Pope Clement, and Samuel Johnson; and a personal interpretation of Durer's "Virgin & Child with Monkey." Finally, a strong element in the volume is the notion of what it should mean to be a Southerner, more specifically, a Richmonder, not just what one inherits, but the way in which that heritage is passed on through the blood and minds of our descendants.

It would be reductive to take Smith's endorsement of cultural citizenship or intellectual consanguinity as an implicit criticism of things physical. After all, the overwhelming physicality of the sports poems functions as the spark which feeds the driving curiosity, the vital energy infusing the other pursuits. In this regard, what at first seems a contradiction in Smith's title – Yeats' assertion declaring that vision might supersede the weariness of the brutes who by definition live without empathy or self-consciousness – is a revelation of the experience from which that weariness and humility derive, allowing for the openness, the receptivity to vision. This vision in turn is facilitated by what the Anglo/Irish poet Louis MacNeice, in a poem called "Snow" defined as "suddenness," a phenomenon that reveals a world "crazier" and more abundant "than we think," / "incorrigibly plural. "

The world Smith provides for us is, indeed, "incorrigibly plural," and these finely wrought, exuberant poems draw us joyfully into it.

to the top of this page